The Maniac
The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut is one of 2026's most credible books, appearing on 2 of the year's most respected lists, including McKinsey & Company, McKinsey & Company, for a Consensus Score of 28 out of 100.
Appears on these lists
Our take
AI-draftedLabatut extends the genre-blurring approach of When We Cease to Understand the World into a tighter, more explicitly biographical mode, using the mathematician John von Neumann's life — and the AI program that later defeated the world's best Go player — to ask whether the intelligence that built the nuclear age and the intelligence now building machine cognition are really different projects. Whether this counts as biography, fiction, or something unclassifiable is a question the reviews raise and mostly decide doesn't matter.
In the press
“Dizzying, unnerving, and packed with ideas about science and mathematics ... Original and startling”
The New York Times“you just throw up your hands and think, Who cares what discourse label we assign this stuff? It's great.”
Tom McCarthy, The New York Times
How the Consensus Score is calculated
Our Consensus Score is our own transparent editorial metric — not a user rating. It weighs each list by the credibility of its source, how recent the listing is, and any award status. Here is the full breakdown.
| Source | Authority | Recency | Award | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| McKinsey & Company | 0.80 | 0.85 | 1.00× | 0.68 |
| McKinsey & Company | 0.80 | 0.70 | 1.00× | 0.56 |
| Weighted sum → Score | 1.24 → 28 | |||
Similar consensus books
Because they appear on some of the same lists.
Frequently asked
What lists is The Maniac on?
The Maniac appears on 2 lists in our 2026 corpus, including McKinsey & Company, McKinsey & Company.
What is its Consensus Score?
The Maniac has a Consensus Score of 28 out of 100, our transparent editorial measure of how many credible lists agree on it.